How do I properly dock?

[Nicholas Kerman]

 

Hello.  I take this game way to seriously. I was wandering if someone could tell me a bit about docking. Like using maths to finds out when a target to dock with is in optimum position to launch. Should I start to slow my spacecraft 1min before intersect? And lastly can I really figure out the avrege altitude of a spacecraft by adding the apoapsis and the periapsis and then dividing the answer by 2?

Thanks heaps guy!

[max_creative]

You don't really need math. Try the docking tutorial in training. Unless you have really low acceleration or you are try to dock with something in a really high orbit, you don't really need to plan when to burn to match velocities. Most dockings happen in LKO.

Yes.

[Nicholas Kerman]

Ok thanks heaps

[bewing]

It's slightly more efficient to burn right at the intercept, but burning "target:retrograde" for a bit before the intercept doesn't really hurt. It'll just slowly modify your orbit to match the target. I often do really high speed intercepts, and you have no choice then but to burn early. I like to burn when I have 50 seconds left to 0m (ie. speed = 14m/s, distance = 700m).

If you want to play some games, you can try to use your burn to push the retrograde marker on top of the anti-target marker before you get to intercept. This mostly works (I do it all the time), but don't try to be too clever or get it too close! Both those markers move around a lot with respect to each other as you get close -- so if you push them right on top of each other, they will drift off significantly -- and you may end up going too slow to get an intercept, and you may be in too low an orbit.

If your intercept is showing that you'll be less than 200 meters apart -- then don't mess with it! Just wait and burn retrograde.

Averaging the Pe and Ap does give you a decent approximation for guessing orbit times, and especially for deciding how fast one object will catch another in orbit.

As far as an optimum time to launch: the kind of ships I launch do not give me accurate control of my initial Ap -- it's always quite high. So on my first orbit, my launched ship is going very slow. This means that if I'm timing my launch, I have to launch at least a quarter of an orbit early. But that gives me a very good opportunity at the Pe to watch the intercept markers as I burn retrograde to lower my Ap. (Provided that the intercept markers are working, which they are most certainly not right now.)

 

Edited June 30, 2016 by bewing